Content By Ryan E. Day

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By: Ryan E. Day

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Headquartered in the little Hamlet of Deming, Washington, Canyon Hydro builds hydroelectric systems producing anywhere from 10 kilowatts up to 25 megawatts. In business for more than 40 years, Canyon Hydro has gained wide recognition with public and independent power producers for highly efficient designs, quality components, and superb customer support. To provide its customers with the most relevant solutions, Canyon Hydro has adopted laser tracker technology to boost the speed and accuracy of fabrication, installations, and alignment of hydroelectric systems.

“Nearly all our projects are custom designed for a specific site,” says Simon Graves, design engineer at Canyon Hydro. “Each system is designed based on water pressure and flow available.”

Projects from Canada to Honduras keep Canyon Hydro’s engineers, technicians, and leaders alert for ways to lean out their processes and enable growth. Apparently, the old-school, tried-and-true technology that had served Canyon Hydro for decades was becoming something of a growth challenge.

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By: Ryan E. Day

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For growth-minded organizations like TS Tech, global supplier of automobile seats and interiors, “the way we’ve always done it” is rarely good enough. As a tier-one supplier to major automotive OEMs, TS Tech always has an eye out for ways to improve quality and throughput. They recently found a way using blue laser scanning technology.

The bottleneck

TS Tech Car Seat

“In 2014, I went to our corporate quality office where I do support for facilities in North and South America,” says Orion Offord, corporate quality engineer at TS Tech. “We had parts coming through all the time for conformation, testing, verification, fixtures, things like that. With only one laser scanner, it became a bottleneck in our processes. We inherited another scanner and that made two, both with red laser technology.”

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By: Ryan E. Day

What do cocoa, socks, and smartphones have in common? If you guessed risk of slavery in the manufacturing supply chain, you are correct. Does your organization have an international supply chain? Then it’s at risk. What are you doing to address the risks associated with modern slavery in your supply chain?

What is modern slavery?

The International Labor Organization (ILO) defines forced labor as “All work or service, which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty for which said person has not offered himself voluntarily.” Approximately 45 million people in the world live in slavery according the Global Slavery Index.

A few of the listed forms of slavery posted by Anti-Slavery International are:
• Forced labor
• Debt bondage
• Descent-based slavery
• Child slavery

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By: Ryan E. Day

Innovation within industry is a must to improve processes, products, and customer experience. Although some innovations, like Amazon’s floating distribution center, seem implausible, other sci-fi technology is already revolutionizing and redefining the way employees accomplish tasks.

Tales of manufacturing and servicing

Truck Repair

“Across the durable goods industry there is tremendous volatility,” says Gary Brooks, CMO of Syncron, a global manufacturing and supply chain technology company. “One month, orders are up 4 percent and the next month they’re down 5 percent. This causes great financial challenges for manufacturers. However, while we’re seeing some declining margins and revenues on the product-based side of the house, on the after-sales service side, the margins are incredibly healthy. We typically see upward of 25 percent of a manufacturing company’s total revenues come from after-sales service.”

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By: Ryan E. Day

If necessity is the mother of invention, disruption is the mother of re-invention. But what do the terms “disruption” and “reinvention” really mean? Shane Cragun and Kate Sweetman tackle both questions in their book, Reinvention: Accelerating Results in the Age of Disruption (Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2016).

As co-founders of SweetmanCragun, a global management consulting, training, and coaching firm, authors Sweetman and Cragun are thought leaders and change agents with firsthand experience working with Fortune 500 companies, world leaders, and multinational corporations.

Age of disruption

Reinvention: Accelerating Results in the Age of Disruption

Making fire and inventing the wheel were pretty big disruptions, so what does the term “disruption” mean? Is it just a catchphrase, or does it have unique implications for the 21st century?

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By: Ryan E. Day

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Building airplanes and spaceships poses some of the most unique engineering and manufacturing challenges mankind has ever encountered. Fortunately, you don’t have to build rockets to benefit from rocket science. Manufacturers of most any product can improve their efficiency and profitability by studying some of the approaches the aerospace industry takes to overcome production obstacles such as waste, rework, and engineering changes.

SWaP-C factors

Composite-using organizations such as Spirit, GKN, Boeing, Airbus, Albany Engineered Composites, and SpaceX do not tend to share proprietary processes, but they do share common hurdles when it comes to engineering and manufacturing. Aerospace—and all other manufacturing verticals—must consider size, weight, power, and cost. And they must factor those elements into the scheme of a complete system or product.

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By: Ryan E. Day

I remember my first trip to Michigan in 2012. I was covering the Ford Motor Co.’s annual Trend Conference and had the opportunity to meet Alan Mulally, who gave a compelling presentation explaining the vision, strategy, and implementation of the One Ford plan. I was impressed more with the man than the plan. At the time, I knew nothing about Mark Fields.

I did not know, for instance, that the One Ford plan was initially developed by Fields. I did not know that Fields was president of the Ford Americas Division and that he would be tapped as Ford’s Chief Operations Officer in a matter of months. And I certainly did not know that Ford considered Mark Fields and Alan Mulally largely responsible for resurrecting the company from, as a Ford blog post from around that time says, “Decades of poor performance and lackluster design that had plagued Ford since the late ‘80s.”

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By: Ryan E. Day

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Founded in 1927 to produce aluminum splints—cutting edge at the time—Zimmer Biomet is a medical device company commanding second place in the entire world’s overall orthopedic market share. The organization’s stated purpose is to “Restore mobility, alleviate pain, and improve the quality of life for patients around the world.” For at least one Zimmer Biomet quality engineer, the nature of the company’s products and what it takes to manufacture them takes on a decidedly sensitive tone.

“For us, yes, we make great products, and yes, our company has a good stock price, but when you see a patient walking around with your product in them, it’s pretty compelling,” says Jeff Livingston, senior quality engineer at the Zimmer Biomet complex in Warsaw, Indiana. “I’ve done some pretty cool things in automotive, but what we do here is huge. Mostly it’s about regular folks just trying to live again, trying to get through life without pain.”

GrandparentsWithChild

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By: Ryan E. Day

During the 1950s, W. Edwards Deming championed quality management philosophies that helped Japan develop into a world-class industrial center. In 1954, Joseph M. Juran was invited to lecture by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers. His visit marked a turning point in Japan’s quality control activities. In 2005, Gordon Styles planted his own flag of quality in the East. Styles, however, did it by founding a high-tech manufacturing facility in Dongguan, China—not exactly known as a hotbed of quality exports.

After reading a case study of Star Rapid’s role in restoring a historic lighthouse, my interest was piqued. Just how does a veteran of the UK rapid-prototyping industry wind up starting a company that provides high-quality rapid prototyping, tooling, and low-volume manufacturing services to businesses and individuals all over the world? When I caught up with Styles for an interview, I found his “why” to be as fascinating as the “how.”

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By: Ryan E. Day

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Everyone in manufacturing has heard about the fantastic properties of composite materials, but if you’re not involved in satellite communications (SATCOM), you’ve probably never heard of Eclipse Composites. If you are into SATCOM and particularly SATCOM antennas, you know the company is a leading name in the industry. You’d also know that Eclipse is performing cutting-edge engineering and manufacturing with composites.

Eclipse is a high-volume manufacturer of next-generation products for the defense, aerospace, and microwave communications markets. The company has earned a reputation as a leader in developing advanced composite hardware that is designed to meet the rigorous standards of the U.S. military.

“Eclipse is the industry standard in SATCOM antennas,” says Jake Leikam, quality assurance engineer at Eclipse. “If you take a walk around the floor of any satellite show, you’ll see our products all over the place. We’re known worldwide as the best antennae out there.”

Eclipse Composite Headquarters